“And those who humble themselves will be exalted”: resentment and evangelical adherence to Bolsonarism

Abstract

The objective of this article is to offer an interpretative framework that helps to understand the outcome of the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, considering the religious factor and the moral agenda as fundamental to the election of Jair Bolsonaro. We start from the hypothesis that resentment is the affection that catalyzes the identification bonds between Bolsonaro and his electorate, especially the evangelical voters. After presenting the theoretical tools we used, structured from the concepts of hegemony, equivalence and populism, we explore the discursive elements of this configuration in order to highlight its importance through the scrutiny of empirical data, which allow us to propose that religious discourse is the main mobilizer of affections translated into electoral adhesion to the candidate.

resentment; Jair Bolsonaro; evangelicals; elections; populism